Memorandum: North Carolina Republicans Have a Plan to Rig This Election. It’s Been Years in the Making.

Memorandum: North Carolina Republicans Have a Plan to Rig This Election. It’s Been Years in the Making.

To: North Carolina Voters, Election Protection Activists, and Democracy Defenders

From: Mally Smith,Senior Adviser, Try And Stop Us

Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026

The Plan

North Carolina Republicans have spent a decade trying to seize control of who runs the state’s elections and whose ballots count in them. Now they are turning that power against voters. Here is what they did, step by step.

Weeks after North Carolina voters elected a new governor, Republicans ripped away his power over elections. For more than 120 years, since 1901, North Carolina's governor appointed the majority of the State Board of Elections. Weeks after voters elected Josh Stein (D) governor in November 2024, the outgoing Republican legislature buried a power grab in Hurricane Helene relief, passed it over the governor's veto, and stripped that power entirely, handing it to a low-level, newly elected Republican state auditor instead — making him the only state auditor in the country who runs elections. That day, Speaker Tim Moore told Steve Bannon the law would help “deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket.”

They handed it to a North Carolina GOP operative. Courts initially ruled the law unconstitutional, but the GOP-supermajority North Carolina's Court of Appeals let it take effect anyway, and Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek installed a Republican majority on the state elections board the very next morning. That majority's first act was to fire Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director who had run North Carolina's 2020 and 2024 elections, andreplace her with Sam Hayes, the general counsel to the Republican House Speaker who helped craft the power grab. Throughout summer 2025, Auditor Boliek proceeded to pick every county board's chair, flipping all 100 to Republican control.

When Trump's DOJ came after North Carolina's voter rolls, the new Republican-majority board rolled over. In May 2025, Trump's DOJ sued the state board over missing ID numbers in old registration records, and Hayes's board settled by flagging 103,000 voters for “Registration Repair.” About 70,000 remained on the list in February, and they must cast provisional ballots until they fix their records.

They hired a partisan to run early voting, then curbed Sunday voting and shuttered poll sites serving lower-income voters, Black voters, and college students. In September 2025, Auditor Boliek hired Dallas Woodhouse, a longtime Republican operative and former executive director of the state GOP, as an “elections liaison” to pressure county boards over early voting sites and hours. Woodhouse pushed county chairs tocut Sunday voting hours and create sites favorable to GOP voters, while shuttering sites serving lower-income and Black voters in the state. The campaign killed an early voting site serving the poorest part of Columbus County, cut sites in Lenoir County where 40 percent of voters are Black, and squeezed out the most popular site for Black voters in Granville County. GOP-controlled election boards also blocked early voting sites on multiple college campuses, including one that had hosted an early voting site consistently for the past decade. In Jackson County, a Republican board member said he was threatened with removal from his seat for backing an early voting site on a college campus. Then, in late August, the GOP-majority state boardvoted along party lines to reject most Sunday early voting hours statewide.

They rammed through changes to make it easier to reject your ballot. On September 4, the day North Carolina becamethe first state in the country to start mailing ballots for this election, the Republican-majority state board posted new rules at 7:09 that morning telling county officials to reject more absentee ballots over envelope mistakes, thenvoted them through 3-2 along party lines hours later. The change had beenstuck in the legislature's own review process; the board bypassed that process entirely and issued the change as staff guidance instead. Counties must now throw out and reissue ballots returned with an unsealed inner envelope or hand-delivered by anyone other than the voter, a near relative, or a guardian.

The Why

North Carolina's elections worked before Republicans took control of them; Republicans are not doing any of this because the process was broken. In July 2022, before the auditor's board took over, the state's election officials rejected a Republican request to let counties reject mail ballots over signature matching, calling the state's absentee process extraordinarily secure. Since seizing the board, Republicans have kept trying to make ballots easier to throw out.

They are doing it because they can see a Democratic wave building and they know they cannot win a fair fight. In November 2024, voters elected a Democratic governor and broke Republicans' veto-proof majority in the state House — even though North Carolina Republicans already hold one of the most aggressive legislative gerrymanders in the country and a state senate supermajority they cannot afford to lose. Months later, Justice Allison Riggs held her state Supreme Court seat even after Jefferson Griffin, a sitting Republican appeals court judge whotrailed her by 734 votes, tried to throw out more than 60,000 ballots to flip the result. Griffin lost. Republicans learned the wrong lesson from it.

Rather than compete for votes, they decided to change who controls the count and how many ballots survive it. Every piece of the plan above exists to help Republicans hold onto power in an election they seem certain to lose.

The Framing

Voters pick our leaders, not the other way around. North Carolina Republicans need to hear this loud and clear. Voters picked a governor, and Republican legislators answered by taking away his power over elections and handing it to a low-level Republican auditor with no experience running them in a purely partisan power grab to rig the game in their favor.

Name what happened, plainly. Unelected, unaccountable Republicans pushed through new rules for throwing out your ballot on the same day the first ballots went in the mail. They fired the director who ran the last two elections. They hired a party operative to redraw early voting behind closed doors.

Say why, and what it costs. Republicans can see the wave coming, and they know they can't win a fair fight in North Carolina. They lost the governor's race. They lost the Supreme Court seat even after trying to throw out 60,000 ballots to steal it. So instead of competing for votes, Trump's allies in Raleigh are changing who counts them and rigging the game at your expense. It could cost voters their ballot, thrown out over an envelope, under a rule they wrote to keep power they couldn't win honestly.

Make the demand. They are counting on you getting discouraged and staying home. Don't give it to them. Register. Vote by mail, or vote early, or show up on November 3. Track your ballot and make sure it counted. Show up in numbers too big for them to erase.

Register. Vote. Track It.

The rulebook they rigged only works if you let a mistake hand them your ballot. Don't. Here is how to make sure yours counts.

Register by October 9. Check your registration or register for the first time atncsbe.gov. If you miss the deadline, you can register and vote in one trip at any early voting site in your county through October 31.

Voting by mail. Ballots are already going out. Request yours by 5 pm on October 20 at ncsbe.gov. When yours arrives, seal it inside both envelopes exactly as instructed, sign where the form says to sign, and make sure your witness signs and fills in their own information too because witness mistakes can’t be fixed later. A missing seal or a mismatched signature is precisely what Republican-majority county boards are now being told to reject, so follow the instructions to the letter and don't give them the opening. It must reach your county board by 7:30 pm on November 3, so mail it early or drop it off at any early voting site in your county.

Voting early. Early voting runs October 15 through October 31. Find your site and hours atncsbe.gov. Bring a state-approved photo ID. Voting early gets your ballot in front of a human being immediately.

Voting on Election Day. Polls are open November 3. Bring a state-approved photo ID. Find your polling place atncsbe.gov.

Track your ballot. If you voted by mail, confirm it was received and accepted throughBallotTrax at ncsbe.gov. If it shows a problem, contact your county board of elections immediately. You may still have the right to fix it before it's thrown out for good.